Freedom's Fire Page 13

  I want to curse, but I’ve already decided it doesn’t matter. Whoever goes in first, it’ll be American grunts that’ll do the bleeding once we board that Trog cruiser.

  Still, he hasn’t objected to my plan.

  “Of course,” I tell him in quick words. By disobeying his orders, his day can only end with dying. The least I can do is allow him to save face. “You have the attack path. You lead. We follow. Cluster tight on impact, so our soldiers can support each other when they leave the ship. Hit as close to the bridge as you can. We’re taking that cruiser.”

  The colonel shouts something in Korean I don’t understand, maybe a war cry, maybe the name of his own dead son for whom he needs vengeance.

  As much as I despise the North Korean-uniformed mannequins, I know the Grays, with no regard for our artificial nationalities, have sacrificed a whole generation of their young as well to feed the war’s boundless appetite.

  “Max grav on my count!” I shout. “Five. Four. Three. Two.”

  Our ship hums and creaks under the strain of acceleration. My battle suit squeaks as it compensates for the fluctuation in our internal grav bubble. The walls and floor glow blue and brilliant. Field lines scintillate as they crawl across every surface.

  “Coming around Juji!” shouts Penny.

  And we all feel the ship make the turn.

  “Lenox,” I call, “strap in.”

  I find myself an empty seat as well.

  The g’s inside the cabin are starting to build.

  The ship was designed to make 1.5 light speed, but in order to do that, most of the power needs to be fed into a set of plates in the drive array that creates a bubble of warped space. The drive array pushes that wave, and the ship surfs it to reach translational speeds exceeding the speed of light while never breaking Einstein’s equations within our localized bubble.

  Theoretical physics—nobody gives a shit about it as long as the ship goes fast.

  For sub-light acceleration, every grav-drive ship—the ones the Grays use, hence the ones humans use, and the ones the Trogs fly—needs massive objects like planets and moons to push and pull against. The push-and-pull is determined by the reversible polarity of the ship’s grav fields. The stronger the ambient field, the faster a ship can accelerate.

  In a way, gravity for these vessels works like the wind did for sailing ships back when those wooden hulks were the height of man’s technological ability to slaughter one another. However, where sailing across a wind was the best way to reach the highest speed in a sailing ship, running directly into or out of a gravity well is the best way to maximize acceleration with grav-drive technology.

  Bottom line on all this crap, Phil calculated the best attack path is not one where we shoot straight across space, curve around earth, and hit the Trog cruisers broadside. Instead, we’re following a parabolic arc away from the earth. Once we come over the top of the arc several thousand miles up, we’ll be on a collision path with our prey coming down from above.

  Raptors diving on a pigeon.

  I like that image.

  “We’re burning twelve g’s!” shouts Penny over the comm, theoretically our max sub-light acceleration.

  The ship is straining, but in seconds, we’ll be going so fast any shots from the Trog cruisers in the area will hit us only through luck.

  Brice is shouting into the platoon comm.

  The platoon joins in a chant, loud and strong.

  I can’t make out what they’re saying. Did I miss some kind of morale module in all that simulator training?

  Brice is psyching them up, girding their strength for what’s to come.

  “Forming up,” Penny tells me over the bridge comm. “Three Koreans in front. Our two about a klick behind.”

  With grav plates pushing so much g, I sense the other four careening ships. All other grav fields are a dim blur.

  We’re climbing the up-bound leg of our parabolic attack arc and it’ll look to all of those Trogs onboard every ship in the area like we’re maxing acceleration for escape velocity, running for the safety of the moon.

  Like he’s reading my mind, Phil says, “They’re ignoring us. No one’s shooting.”

  “Parabolic peak in twenty seconds,” Penny tells us.

  It’s going to be a short, hard trip, thankfully. No time for skittishness.

  Between the chanted words, Sergeant Brice tells the troops to ready their weapons and hold on tight, just in case the bridge dumbasses fuck up the grav bubble inside the platoon compartment.

  Everybody laughs—the kind of laugh that sounds forced through a torrent of other emotions. Yet Brice isn’t making a joke for humor’s sake, he’s bonding the platoon, gluing them with the cement of shared emotion.

  I need to pay more attention to him if I want to learn how to lead soldiers.

  The blue grav fields flash a blinding intensity, the ship shakes violently, and we all grumble as the internal bubble fails to fully compensate.

  An instant later, things stabilize again.

  “On the way down,” Penny yells at us. “Impact in fifty seconds!”

  Chapter 29

  The ship is hurtling toward the earth.

  The current is reversed in our drive array’s grav plates, and so is the polarity of the fields. The earth is pulling the ship closer, and the planet is moving in the most imperceptibly minuscule smidgen of a degree toward us.

  The mutually attractive hug of gravity. Physics again.

  Far below us, I see our targets in my mind, glowing fiery-brilliant grav signatures from their megaton masses. Multiple fusion reactors pump gigawatts of current through their drive arrays, sending blue field lines pulsing over their hulls like giant jellyfish tentacles.

  Each of the kilometer-long ships is shaped like a sleek leopard shark without fins, with a crest of bristling railguns down the back, and two more along the lower edge on port and starboard. It has a roughly triangular cross-section so the three rows of guns can shoot at the three hundred and sixty degrees of space surrounding the ship. Each crest is lined on both sides by rows of grav plates huge enough to handle the load of maneuvering the megaton monster through the solar system.

  Despite all that power, like our cruisers, those Trog ships max at four g’s acceleration.

  They can’t escape.

  At least not at sub-light speeds.

  We’re halfway down the descent leg of our parabolic arc when the Trogs realize what’s happening. It’s not something they expected.

  Some of their dorsal guns start to fire.

  The three Trog ships are cruising in a line with ten-kilometer gaps between them, yet their order is dissolving as each maneuvers tentatively.

  Nothing they can do will make a difference now.

  No ship in existence has the power to move a megaton mass out of our way in the short seconds left.

  “Slowing to ramming speed!” Penny shouts over the comm.

  God she’s got to be the bravest of us, flying headlong into a collision we’ll only survive if our secret weapon works as planned.

  “Redirecting all power to the grav lens,” Phil tells us.

  The sky fills with railgun slugs from all three ships.

  The Trogs’ squirmy brains have deduced all the doubt out of their guess as to the flavor of shit that’s screaming in their direction. Their fears have awakened.

  I see their grav fields as clear as the sun.

  All five of our ships are heading toward one of theirs, and it’s maxing its starboard grav plates to get out of our way.

  “Ten seconds,” Phil warns.

  All of the grunts tense.

  Then the grav picture unexpectedly shifts.

  “Shit!” shouts Phil.

  Chapter 30

  Ramming anything at the speeds we’re moving would be suicide if it weren’t for gravity technology.

  As it is, even nestled in the grav bubble protecting the crew, if our ship collided with an alien vessel at several thousand miles per ho
ur, both ships would be obliterated, and there’d be nothing left of our bodies but a haze of complex molecules.

  The ramming tactic depends on something besides speed, and that’s the strength and polarity of the target ship’s gravity defense. The plates in their hull that help it maneuver and create artificial gravity inside—just like ours—serve double duty to create a repulsive exterior field that can deflect kinetic weaponry: bullets, railgun slugs, meteors, shit like that. That’s the primary means of defense these ships have.

  It sounds simple but it’s not.

  Too much incoming fire will overwhelm the deflective field. A poorly shaped field will repulse less efficiently than an optimally shaped one. Fire from multiple directions makes effective field shaping nearly impossible. At least with standard brainpower.

  A big enough computer might work such a problem out in real time with a thousand tons of hyper-velocity steel bearing down from three directions, but there’s nearly no computing power in our ships. Wherever the hell the Grays came from they never invented computers, and they don’t trust ours.

  All that aside, nobody’s ever taken three hundred tons of steel momentum, used a grav lens to focus it down to the diameter of a pencil, and speared it through the defensive fields on one of these cruisers. Because the genius human engineers conceived, lab-tested, designed, and built these ships so quickly—no sarcasm intended—there was no time to field test or calibrate any of it.

  That’s just the way things are when you’re losing a war. You do what you can with what you’ve got.

  So, we have to depend on the pilot and the gravity officer in each ship to get the collision speed and angle right, first time, and every time.

  Makes you wonder if the Wright brother who stayed on the ground was the one who won the coin toss.

  “They’re changing the grav field intensity!” shouts Phil, talking about the Trog ship.

  “Goddammit!” shouts Penny. “The Koreans are slamming the brakes too hard.”

  “Blow by!” I order. “Pass them! Ram that fat pigeon!”

  Did I say I liked that image?

  We don’t pass the Korean ships. They’re too far ahead.

  And too slow.

  The Trogs’ defensive grav deflects them in quick succession, sending each careening toward the ground.

  All three reverse polarity on their drive arrays and max grav to avoid burning through earth’s atmosphere and burrowing into the Arizona desert.

  “Reverse our drive array polarity!” I shout.

  “But—” Phil protests.

  “Do it now, dammit!”

  He does.

  Now, the Trog ship’s gravitational mass and all of the power it’s pouring into its deflection field suck us in, instead of pushing us away.

  We can’t miss.

  “Max grav bubble!” shouts Phil on the ship comm.

  The cabin burns bright blue like it did at the top of the arc. I feel squeezed from every direction.

  “Ramming!”

  A flash of blue nearly blinds me as the power sent to the grav lens surges.

  Through my seat, I feel metal break, screech, and bend. We’re in vacuum, so the collision happens in silence.

  One of the assault doors blows in and smashes two grunts to mush. Flaming atmosphere from the Trog ship flashes through the platoon compartment.

  Our battle suits protect us.

  The blue disappears with the fire and the sound of metal turning to wreckage rips through the air.

  And stops.

  Everything goes silent for half a second.

  We lived through it.

  The ship quakes again under the sound of wrenching metal, different this time. Not close.

  I hope it’s the impact of Jill’s ship.

  “Go!” Sergeant Brice shouts. He’s already unstrapped and out of his seat. “Get out there and kill ‘em while they’re stunned.”

  Grunts are slow to move. Most are shaken, or busy thanking God for the breath they just inhaled.

  I’m on my feet, wobbly but moving to an exit. Lenox is beside me, and together we pull on the thick iron handles of a door. It grinds on rusty gears.

  “Up, up, up!” Brice shouts. “Go, go!”

  “Careful when you egress,” I announce to the platoon. “You’ll need your suit grav.”

  The door I’m working on with Lenox rolls fully open. Outside, across the opening, is a girder as thick as a man’s torso. Cables, bent steel, and shredded composite debris make it seem like we’re blocked in.

  We’re not.

  Through gaps in the wreckage, I see the Trog ship’s cavernous interior, all the way to the stern.

  “Set up a machine gun here,” I order. It’ll give the grunts inside good cover with a wide field of fire.

  Taking a quick glance around the platoon compartment, I see four assault doors are open. Grunts are lining up, but no one is yet out the door.

  Brice is readying his squad, and he’s not too happy about how slowly they’re doing it.

  I rush toward an open door with no debris blocking it from the outside.

  I try to get a picture of what’s surrounding the ship using my perception of gravity, but all I see is psychedelic noise. Too many grav plates shifting fields in too many directions, too much mass bent every which way.

  I shout into the bridge comm, “Penny keep the ship safe. Phil, keep me apprised.”

  Feeling like we’ve wasted too many seconds of our surprise, I push past a soldier hesitating at an open door. I take a fast glance at the situation outside and jump as I holler, “Follow me!”

  Chapter 31

  I’m in a howling wind carrying me toward a crack in the cruiser’s hull.

  Our ship smashed its way into the cruiser’s central hangar bay, a warehouse space a hundred meters wide, and more than half a kilometer long. All the air in the void is being sucked into space, and I’m caught in it.

  “Wait! Don’t go!” I shout over the comm. Barely anyone in my platoon can control their suit well enough to be out here. “Stay inside!”

  I’m maxing power to my suit grav to fight the gusts rushing past me.

  Plumes of fire ghost into existence where hydrogen and oxygen from ruptured tanks mix in the presence of sparking metal. Fortunately, space’s vacuum kills the flames as soon as they form.

  “Close the assault doors,” I shout. The air that rushed into the ship when we collided might now drag my troops back out again.

  A tornado starts to form in the vast hangar as air swirls out through the holes in the hull.

  I fly away from the vortex.

  Debris, railgun slugs—the size of a fist, thousands of them—are in the air. More slugs, the size of cars, bounce and roll in the fluctuating grav and high winds.

  Trogs, some stripped of their clothing by the powerful gusts, are bouncing off the floors and beams as shards of steel tear through them.

  The tornado is writhing and jumping in the turbulence.

  Feeling unsafe, I grav drive deeper into the Trog cruiser.

  And then I realize I’m the first soldier ever to see the inside of one of these monsters. At least no other human has lived to tell about it. I spin in the air to get the lay of the land. Indeed it does look just like one of ours.

  I see Jill’s ship is protruding through the hull, about two-thirds deep, just like mine. None of her assault doors are open.

  “Situation?” Brice calls to me over the comm.

  “The Trog’s internal air supply,” I tell him. “Give it another minute to blow into space, or we’ll lose half our platoon when they exit.”

  The tornado is already dying. The gaps in the hull are huge, and there’s only so much air inside.

  Within the hangar space, the gravity is axial, the same way we set it inside our assault ship. However, this cruiser is so huge, Trogs can walk normally on any of the exterior walls as if they were floors. Right now, none of them are walking. Some are still tumbling in the wind. The rest are hol
ding onto anything they can get their arms around.

  Futile.

  They’re all going to suffocate when the last of the air is sucked into space.

  The ship shudders and the gravity fields jiggle.

  We destroyed hundreds of the big ship’s grav plates during the collision, and the Trogs on the bridge can’t get the internal field stabilized. Thanks to the alien bug, I see the gravity shifts in stunning visual clarity, and it makes everything I see seem momentarily under the surface of a wavy pool.

  I look toward the bow. The first tenth of the ship in that direction is walled off from the hangar bay. In our fleet’s cruisers, that’s the Gray zone. Only those pencil-necked little bastards and their North Korean toadies are up there, segregated from the lowly humans who do the sweating and the bleeding.

  In the Gray zone, they’ve got communal rooms, cafeterias, pods where the Grays sleep, and dorms for the North Koreans, everything they need to live life separately from the grunts in the rest of the ship. The bridge is that way, right at the bow. The railgun targeting centers are also located up there, remotely aiming each of the gun emplacements along the ship’s three spines. A Gray or a Korean with a bug in his head does that work.

  You’ve got to have an intimate relationship with gravity if you want to aim a long-range railgun with any accuracy.

  The expansive central hangar section houses giant hoppers, magazines for the slugs that feed the railguns, storage racks for the projectiles, and crane mechanisms for moving them from rack to hopper. The guns appear to be loaded manually, one shot at a time—both labor-intensive and slow. There are so many railguns down each spine, however, that collectively this ship can pour out tons of projectiles every second.

  All of the facilities for housing the Trogs’ gun crews are in a gridwork of structures built in a layer along the three flat sides of the ship.

  Suspended on the ship’s long axis, connected to the sides by a web of thick supports and conduit, are a trio of fusion reactors, each separated by a hundred meters. They’re the three beating hearts of this monster.

  The aft quarter of the ship is walled off, just like the bow section. In our ships, that’s the barracks. Ten thousand SDF soldiers are bunked back there in cubbyholes for sleeping quarters. There are also gyms, storerooms, infirmaries, latrines, and ready-rooms, each adjacent to a large door that opens to the outside. I guess there has to be ten thousand Trog soldiers in those quarters, recovering from the surprise of the impact and putting on their space suits so they can come and kill us.